I’m especially persuaded by the arguments that Fischer
forwards which in many ways are anticipated by his earlier work AmericaCalling: The Social History of the Telephone.
Despite high brow fears that phone use encouraged “idle chit chat” and
mere “gossip,” Fischer concludes that the telephone, at least until 1940, was a
“technology of sociability” that expanded the “volume of social activity” in
ways that its users generally welcomed. (America
Calling , p. 254). In Still Connected (2011),
Fischer comes to similarly un-alarming conclusions about modern digital
technologies:

“using the internet has little effect on average user’s
level of face to face contact….Although access to the Internet may have vastly
expanded American’s acquaintances – the Facebook “friends” sort of circle – it would
not have been a revolution in their personal relationships, just a nudge.”
[p.96]

Eric Klinenberg (who was actually Fischer’s student not so
long ago) concurs in his recently published book GoingSolo. While Americans are living alone
in greater numbers than ever before, the Internet “affords rich new ways to
stay connected.” With the Internet, and a
variety of other modern social infrastructures, “Living alone and being alone
are hardly the same…” p.19 Klinenberg
even titles chapter five of his book “Together Alone.” This obviously recalls, and implicitly
challenges Turkle’s book with the reverse title (e.g. Alone Together). Despite fears to the contrary, Fischer and
Klinenberg argue that social networking technologies are enhancing rather than
detracting from our ability to connect and form bonds with others.

While I’m swayed by the empirical firepower that Fischer and
Klinenberg bring to the debate, in the last two weeks I feel like it’s been
used in ways that discredit Turkle and Marche overmuch. For example, in a recent head to head debate
between Marche and Klinenberg on CNBC Marche developed a hand dog look that, combined with his self effacing claims
to be merely an essayist rather than a
sociologist made his point of view come off much the worse for wear. Similarly, on a post on the very engaging
Cyborgology blog (and some of the twitter streams of its acolytes), Turkle is
dismissed as an elitest whose high brow, nostalgic, and digial dualist sensibilities are preventing her from seeing how mobile devices actually augment reality. (Our banal prattle
about lolcats actually does serve an important social purpose!) Finally, the populist critique reached its most entertaining
and literal lowpoint in a Downfall parody that made a raging Hitler, besieged
in his Berlin bunker, the mouthpiece of Turkle’s worries:

So where then is the middle ground? Is there some sort of synthesis or
reconciliation that can be reached for between these positions? I’m biased of course, but I find it in the
work of my wife Susan Matt whose Homesickness, An American History dwells at
length on the way that homesickness (an emotion which shares much in common
with loneliness) is shaped and reshaped by transportation and communication
technology. In brief, the history begins
in the colonial period (our antecedents were intrepid but many still longed for
what they had left behind). It concludes
with a look at college kids and recent immigrants who, being a little less technologically bereft than our
forebears, use Facebook , mobile phones, and Skype to assuage their longing for
home. Of course, the experience of
homesickness has changed in the last 250 years (in the past people actually
used to die of it). However one thing that
has remained constant is that our technologies sometimes compound homesickness,
sometimes mitigate it, but have never annihilated it:

It is possible that these new
technologies actually heighten feelings of displacement. María Elena Rivera, a
psychologist in Tepic, Mexico, believes technology may magnify homesickness.
Her sister, Carmen, had been living in San Diego for 25 years. With the rise of
inexpensive long-distance calling, Carmen was able to phone home with greater
frequency. Every Sunday she called Mexico and talked with her family, who
routinely gathered for a large meal. Carmen always asked what the family was
eating, who was there. Technology increased her contact with her family but
also brought a regular reminder that she was not there with them.

The immediacy that phone calls and
the Internet provide means that those away from home can know exactly what they
are missing and when it is happening. They give the illusion that one can be in
two places at once but also highlight the impossibility of that proposition. (The New Globalist is Homesick)

To me this is the history that leads to the middle ground. Loneliness (like homesickness) is a perennial
condition of American society and one we may be particularly prone to given our
cult of the intrepid pioneer who is willing to cut home ties. More importantly these technologies sometimes
mitigate these discontents. But in other
instances they sharpen them. So we can
take solace in the general, largely benign, trends that Fischer and his fellow company
of sociologists have highlighted: the development of steam ships, the
telephone, air travel, and the Internet have by and large drawn us closer
together. But that doesn’t mean that in
individual instances these technologies always have that effect. Put another way our individual discontents
are not somehow suddenly erased or rendered meaningless by aggregate social
trends. Which is why Turkle and Marche’s
worries still have traction for the rest of us.

That traction is especially manifest in the closing
paragraph of Turkle’s essay where she describes her walks on a Cape Cod beach
and her impression that in the past people experienced those walks more
profoundly than when we have our nose in our cell phones (as apparently we do
now). Some critics have taken her to
task for those passages as nostalgic yearnings for a past that never existed or
as a celebration of a privileged experience that a good portion of humanity can’t
afford. Those criticisms are spot on as
far as they go. But I’ll wager that
Turkle’s sentiments aren’t just the sentiments of an elite or of someone stuck
in the memories of a false past. Take
for example this short viral video put out by a Thai mobile phone company called
Disconnect To Connect:

Like the phone company we might want to acknowledge that if using
communication devices is generally good, that doesn’t mean it’s always good. Given
the research, most of the time we will be using our social networking technologies
in healthy ways. But let’s continue to
watch out for those circumstances in which they work against our interests –
whether we’re walking on a Cape Cod beach or a Thai one.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

In our
course "Are machines making you stupid?" we just finished reading The
Shallows -- Nicholas Carr's excellent rumination on the way digital
technologies may be rewiring human intelligence (and not always for the
better). I'm struck, having now read the
book twice, by how much the book refers to the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey-- and
the way that movie, and Carr's references to it, help delineate the differences
between instrumentalism and technological determinism.

These isms
are core frameworks for understanding how humans and technology relate and Carr
summarizes the concepts nicely on p.46 of his text:

For centuries, historians and philosophers have traced, and debated, technology's role in shaping civilization. Some have made the case for what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed 'technological determinism': they've argued that technological progress, which they see as an autonomous force outside man's control, has been the primary factor influencing the course of human history.....At the other end of the spectrum are the instrumentalists -- the people who....downplay the power of technology, believing tools to be neutral artifacts, entirely subservient to the conscious wishes of their users. Our instruments are the means we use to achieve our ends; they have no ends of their own.

As it turns
out, these isms are also well represented in 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the opening scenes a hominid is playing
with a bone and gradually realizes that the bone can be used as a tool which
(s)he uses in a later scene to attack another hominid. After the attack the bone spins high into the
air gradually dissolving into a spaceship.
This scene is one of the more familiar and classic transitions in
Hollywood film making but what's nice about it in the context of technology
studies is that it illustrates what instrumentalism is. The bone is a tool or weapon that is
inanimate. While it empowers the hominid
and makes him/her more violent, the tool has no agency of its own. It isn't, in other words, an autonomous
technology that operates independently of the hominid who wields it. Here's some imagery to help you recall the
scene:

In contrast,
later in the movie, technology becomes more autonomous. HAL -- the computer -- attempts to take over
the spaceship and Dave (one of the astronauts) is compelled to remove HAL's
memory banks as depicted in the following scenes:

Here, of
course, technology is no longer depicted instrumentally. If in the beginning of the film the hominid
shapes his tools, by the middle, the tools are reshaping the hominids and are
doing so in ways that aren't always in keeping with the hominid's best
interests. Here's how Carr summarizes the scene in the last paragraph of his book:

What makes it so poignant and so weird, is the computer's emotional response to the disassembly of it's mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut -- "I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid" and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence.HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that
characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business
with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions
feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the
world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human
character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s
dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our
understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens
into artificial intelligence.

For a
variety of reasons, students are reluctant to admit that the relationship
between our tools and ourselves can be anything but instrumental. It's a constant challenge getting them to
consider autonomous technology as anything but fantasy. 2001 A Space
Odyssey is a nice venue for exploring the possibility of a more complex
relationship between humans and machines. And Carr takes it one step further by showing that these same challenging relationships exist between ourselves and our more earthbound digital devices.

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About Me

Luke Fernandez is Manager of Program and Technology Development at Weber State University. On the side he likes to write on the state of the university and the humanities in the information age. You can find out more about me at lfernandez.org